The statements in this section may serve as a background to help understand the invention, but may not constitute prior art.
In the field of media-based project creation, there are many applications that assist users in creating media-based projects. Examples include applications to make photobooks, applications to design manufacturing parts, three-dimensional computer aided design software (such as AutoCAD), and a whole variety of other software applications and packages that have multiple pages, views, or complex navigation and editing patterns during project editing.
A common drawback with conventional media-based project creation software is the difficulty in organizing, arranging, and re-arranging photos, pages, and spreads when there are many photos of different types in a project. Conventionally, a user needs to manipulate multiple views and navigate in multiple locations in the software. Users must often repetitively perform trial and error actions in finding a best photo arrangement, wasting time and deteriorating user experience in the process. These user experience problems are exacerbated even further on space-constrained user devices, such as mobile phones, tablets, and so on.
Recently, the advent of photography in mobile devices has sparked consumer interest in the making of photo books or photo albums using the same devices. Mobile devices are commonly provisioned with mobile applications called Apps. Such Apps are commonly available via mobile operating systems, such as APPLE IOS and GOOGLE ANDROID systems. Such Apps allow mobile Internet users (consumers or users) to perform similar functions that were traditionally performed by websites on desktop computers or laptops.
However, given the aforementioned difficulty in inputting and viewing information, designing and ordering photo books or photo albums via a display of a space-constrained mobile Internet device has remained a challenge, thus contributing to friction points or barriers in sales of such books or albums.
It would be an advancement in the art in such media-based project creation applications to be able to easily, quickly, and intuitively operate on a media-based project comprising a plurality of photos in a space-constrained user device.
Therefore, there is a long-felt and unsolved need to make it easy and efficient for a user to easily and conveniently edit photo, page, and spread arrangements on a space-constrained user device.
It is against this background that various embodiments of the present invention were developed.